


RIC OR TREAT Or, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round

by executrix



Category: The Vampire Diaries
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-06
Updated: 2011-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-16 00:52:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Halloween fic, posted late...but bad taste is timeless.</p>
            </blockquote>





	RIC OR TREAT Or, Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round

Damon licked away at the deep crimson stain on his upper lip. He absent-mindedly sucked salt from his fingertips, then rubbed his fingers dry on a cocktail napkin printed with staggering-drunk Santa Clauses (authentic Mad Men era dead stock).

The beet Terra Chips were his favorite, so he always left them for last.

He went on with what he’d been doing—liveblogging “Downton Abbey,” he enjoyed telling them what they got wrong. Then the doorbell got bludgeoned. He muttered, “Peasants with torches?” under his breath. He got up to look, because it got expensive replacing the door after the intruders died.

“Arrrrr!” Damon and Alaric said simultaneously as Damon opened the door. Alaric, because he was wearing a pirate costume, complete with eyepatch and stuffed parrot sewed to one shoulder. Damon because Alaric was wearing a pirate costume, complete with eyepatch and stuffed parrot sewed to one shoulder.

“I was at the Halloween party!” Alaric said.

Damon sighed. What was it with this town? It seemed to lurch from one festivity to another, rather like the original “Holiday Inn”. (Damon had gone to its premiere at the Radio City Music Hall, although it was not his favorite Crosby film—he preferred “Going My Way,” because he thought Ingrid Bergman made a really hot nun.) And it wasn’t as though the town had much of anything to celebrate—something for which Damon himself took a lot of credit.

Alaric weaved slightly in place. Damon helped him through the door, sniffing a hellish mixture of pheromones, craft beer, vodka, cranberry juice, and Triple Sec. Presumably Alaric had started on the beer and then switched to Cosmopolitans, unless he had combined them in some kind of girlie boilermaker. Someone was going to be suffering the tortures of the damned in the morning, and it wasn’t Damon. Just the kind of 2-0 World Cup result that Damon liked best.

Damon didn’t have the heart to turn him around and pilot him outside, and besides it was funny, so he followed him, then put his hand in the middle of Alaric’s chest and pushed gently until he collapsed onto the sofa. Damon wrenched the parrot off Alaric’s shoulder and tossed it into the fireplace, yielding a cloud of toxic fumes that Damon didn’t, after all, have to breathe. Then he went to the refrigerator—the one in the kitchen, not the one in the cellar—and handed Alaric a rocky blue drink in the good crystal. Off Alaric’s dubious look, he said, “Gatorade. For the electrolytes. Now, as if I didn’t know, what are you doing here?”

“Things just don’t make sense any more. I came to this town to kill you…”

“Yeah. Because I killed Isobel, except she isn’t dead. You might be able to get away with killing me for screwing her, but this isn’t Texas. Also, you couldn’t anyway.”

“And I was supposed to be a scholar…”

“Except that the job market sucks. One day you’re burning with a hard, gem-like flame. Next day you’re at East Dicklick Aggie and Tech trying to get across the concept of ‘comma’ to an audience that would probably be better off with suitable recession-proof topics like ‘chipping flints.’”

“You’re wrong. They probably re-named it East Dicklick Technical Multi-versity,” Alaric said mordantly. “And instead, now, what am I? I’m a high school teacher facing enrollments that’re dropping faster than the Dow. Pretending to be a high school teacher. Am I a real high school teacher? I don’t know.”

“Have you entirely ruled out ‘butterfly pretending to be a Chinese philosopher’?” Damon asked him.

“So after there are so many things that di’n’t turn out the way I expected, the way I thought they were supposed to be, then maybe I have to ask myself why I’m not…”

“Holding out for a hetero?” Damon suggested. “There isn’t much of a gay scene here in Denial Central, but I can give you some addresses down the road a piece. No, wait, you’re offering me for your little exploration, right?”

“It should be you…us! We have a lot in common!” Alaric said.

“Well, yeah, in terms of Joining the Group, Pathetic Losers Who Got Dumped Without Even a Dear John and Also, I’m Alive, Asshole, Letter,” Damon said.

Alaric looked insulted. “I meant Isobel.”

“If we ever have a PR campaign—y’know, if the blood moustaches thing doesn’t pan out—it could be ‘Vampires. Giving you a fuck ‘cause we really don’t.’ But even for a vampire, I’m kind of a ho,” Damon said. “So there’s no point in tracing some kind of lineage for everyone I’ve ever laid end to end.”

“Nice jeans,” Alaric said, pressing an unsteady hand up and down the thigh of one soft, well-worn 501.

“From the gold rush,” Damon said. “Bought ‘em from Levi Strauss himself. And what an anthropologist was doing in my jeans I’ll never know.”

“Really?” Alaric said. “Must be worth a fortune.”

“No, not really,” Damon said. “I haven’t been reducing to e-Baying my wardrobe at the moon.” (Well, there had been that temporary financial embarrassment in Tokyo in the eighties and that thing with the used-underwear vending machine franchise…) “Look, either it’s a joke—you should look it up, start with Google—or I’m lying, which I usually am. You can pretty much never count on anything I ever say for truth value.”

“I don’t know if all what you’re saying adds up to ‘No’ or ‘Yes.’”

“That’s ‘cause you’re drunk,” Damon said.

“Yeah, like you’re not?” Alaric said. As far as he could tell, Damon seemed to have the same approach to Maker’s Mark as Isobel had to mineral water: at least eight glasses a day, for the complexion. Isobel didn’t insist on using the good crystal, though.

Damon got to his feet and clasped Alaric’s wrist, still not knowing if he was going to pull him across the floor and push him out the door, or just let go and let him slump to the floor. He squinted at Alaric, and opted for the latter, based on the soft, rumpled, furry, early Harrison Ford quality. Anyway, it wasn’t safe for Ric to be wandering around at night in that condition. Because once Damon took you under his patriarchal protection, you’d be taken care of. Until you were lunch.

“Ummmmp,” Alaric said when he landed. Damon suddenly appeared on top of him, and framed Alaric’s face with his hands. He held it just long enough to register how gently he was threatening, and then bent his head. Alaric grabbed him, clutching at solid muscle down from tenderloin to the inset of a narrow waist to paradigmatic ass, and dove into a kiss that was a lot of tongue and possibly, here and there, a teasing hint of fang.

Then, swiftly as pocket-picking (or was it more like shoulder surfing?) Alaric wasn’t wearing a shirt, although taking it off must have put Damon into a balance in Boat pose. Not that Alaric hadn’t noticed before just how strong Damon was. And closing your eyes to be kissed was kind of late vis a vis compulsion anyway.

“Please!” Damon said. “You might have a leg to stand on—or a drunk ass to fall on-- if I turned up at your house, but considering that you turned up at mine, where you don’t have to be invited in…”

Pants. Shoes. Underwear. Socks. All gone in an instant, and then Damon’s hands slowed down to perceptability and roamed all over, although Alaric wasn’t too sure but there might have been twenty seconds or so when Damon didn’t seem to be there but there seemed to be a voice murmuring somewhere. And in less than a second Damon’s body could shift from crouched over Alaric to spooning him, his closed lips rubbing against Alaric’s neck to remind him how entirely Alaric was at the mercy of someone notorious for not having any.

Fireplaces aren’t very efficient, and those huge, ox-roasting numbers with the man-sized logs leave you crisped on one side, cold on the other, a phenomenon only exacerbated in Alaric’s case by having a roaring blaze on one side and a vampire on the other.

“I’d like to clarify something,” Alaric said. “I don’t want you to fuck me. That’s right off the table…rug…”

“Whatever,” Damon said. “Because your motto is Safety First. You just hang on to that.”

“Well, I mean, we hardly know each other…also, why am I naked, and you have all your clothes on?”

Damon glided his belt out of the loops, allowing his jeans to slump beneath the architectonic line of his obliques. Then he pleated up his shirt (a well-worn Jimi Hendrix concert tee), crossed his arms, and lifted it up frame-by-frame. He liked to slow down the Reveal, so the spectator(s) could enjoy it properly. Damon envied Elena. If *he* had a Doppelganger, he’d tap it harder than the love child of Savion Glover and Woody the Woodpecker.

Alaric sneaked a look, as if it was the allegedly cruisy third-floor john at Willis and Martha Sneddon Memorial Library, until he reminded himself that he didn’t have to sneak, looking was appreciated. Nothing special, Alaric concluded. This was a relief, because sooner or later Damon, who had presumably seen it ALL, was going to render a verdict. Alaric was hoping for the Hot Tamale Train. For a fraction of a second, Alaric was surprised that Damon was uncircumcised, but then treated himself to a few seconds of social-historical speculation about just how long Damon had been a vampire when his equipment ceased to be conventionally configured.

Alaric brushed his hand up from Damon’s hip, along the ridges of the muscles. “Jesus, you could cut your hand on those things,” he said, with a flash of Damon’s tongue delicately sipping at the wound, reminding you that you were a heartbeat away from being shredded into coleslaw. Ripped. Exploded.

Alaric started to sit up. Damon rested his hands on Ric’s shoulder and pulled him up until they were kneeling face to face, in one long kiss, hands continually in new-found lands. Then they were standing, then backed to a wall, everyplace except the excessively logical sofa. Then on the rug again, with Damon’s body sometimes elusive, sometimes pressing down like a lead weight, his hands nearly caressing (reminding Alaric of air hockey) or scratching or pinching or scooping a muscle or pinning Alaric’s hands down.

Damon folded his body, flipped end-over-end, starting over again at Ric’s feet. Alaric could feel his feet relax, and everything else tighten into a spiral. Damon moved upward, licking, nibbling, until his head rested on one of Alaric’s thighs as he sucked at the inside of the other thigh and then Alaric felt everything that was wound up uncurl. He grabbed onto the first thing he could find, which happened to be Damon’s cock, adding synchrony to synesthesia with a taste in his mouth like a cello concerto. He thought he heard Damon say something, he couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like “Elena.” Then, probably a little later, Alaric was sure he heard something, from outside. Two long honks of a horn.

Damon lifted his head (rubbing his hair across Alaric’s chest). His eyes were sleepy and sated and his lips were fuller than usual. “That must be your cab now…”

“My cab?”

“Better get dressed chop-chop, you better believe they don’t like coming out here, and he can get plenty of fares from the party.” While Alaric was still parsing this, he felt his torso levitate, where his clothes were being replaced only a little slower than they had been removed.

“Bedroom?” he said, gathering up his shoes, trying to remember why there was a huge rip in the shoulder of his pirate shirt.

There was a third, even more emphatic, honk, and the threatening sound of an engine starting up.

“As you said, ducky, we hardly know each other. Are you counting on being invited back? Do you want to be my bestest friend?”


End file.
